Popular or Scientific Animal Psychology. 5 



act psychological methods. It is, unfortunately, often 

 rendered worse by the inclination of animal psychologists 

 to see the intellectual achievements of animals in the 

 most brilliant light. . . . Unbridled by scientific 

 criticism, the imagination of the observer ascribes the 

 phenomena in perfectly good faith to motives which are 

 entirely of its own invention. The facts reported may 

 be wholly true; the interpretation of the psychologist, 

 innocently woven in with his account of them, puts them 

 from first to last in a totally wrong light. You will 

 find a proof of this on nearly every page of the works 

 on animal psychology." 



The dangers hinted at by Wundt to which pseudo- 

 psychology may give rise in a scientific examination of 

 the psychic faculties of animals are not at all new. More 

 than a hundred years ago the elder Reimarus emphati- 

 cally objected in his "General Considerations on the 

 Instincts of Animals" to the undiscriminating human- 

 ization of animals, of which certain modern psychologists 

 are so very fond. 1 Many representatives of Christian 

 views of nature have recently, and without regard to 

 Reimarus, energetically protested against this extremely 

 unscientific method of pseudo-psychology. 2 Although 

 Wundt's suggestions merely express an old truth, they 

 are not, on that account, less instructive and less worthy 

 of consideration; the more so, as Wundt knows their 



*) "Allgemeine Betrachtungen ueber die Triebe der Thiere," 3d 

 edition, Hamburg, 1773. See especially 23. 



2 ) "Seelenleben der Thiere" (3d edition, 1897), by Otto Fluegel, an 

 adherent of Herbart's Philosophy. "Der Thierische Wille," by G. H. 

 Schneider, a Darwinian zoologist who dedicated his work to Prof. Dr. E. 

 Haeckel, as if he wished to prove, that "mediaeval" philosophers and 

 theologians were not the only ones inclined to oppose the views of mod- 

 ern animal psychology. 



